Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
How did Ginsberg end up in the psychiatric hospital where he met Carl Solomon? By pleading insanity to criminal charges related to storing stolen items in his college dorm room. (Ginsberg himself didn't steal the stuff). (Source)
Neal was a mischievous figure at the heart of the Beat movement, and with whom Ginsberg had a sexual relationship. But it didn't work out. Ginsberg was gay; Neal was mostly straight. (Source)
The three dons of the Beat movement – Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs – used to act out spontaneous plays in Ginsberg's apartment, in which Burroughs would dress up as a "shifty vicious governess." Oh, what we would pay to have seen that… (Source)
Ginsberg wrote Part II of Howl while high on peyote. (Source)